SoftNAS Cloud Version 3.3 Now Available in the AWS Marketplace

The APN is fortunate to have a strong ecosystem of APN Partners that continue to iterate on their products, listening to the needs of customers to deliver products that address legitimate technical needs. SoftNAS is no exception, and the release of SoftNAS Cloud 3.3 brings several substantive improvements to the company’s popular virtual NAS platform.

What is SoftNAS Cloud?

SoftNAS Cloud is a virtual filer appliance that runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), leveraging AWS storage offerings like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). SoftNAS Cloud offers block and object level storage via common storage protocols like CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI, while providing enterprise-grade features like cross-zone replication and failover. SoftNAS continues to be a popular product in the AWS Marketplace due to its ease of use and feature set.

What’s New in SoftNAS Cloud 3.3?

An important feature of SoftNAS Cloud is the ability to establish a high availability configuration of the Cloud appliance. In this architecture, two SoftNAS instances are deployed across two availability zones, using SNAP-HA to replicate data between the instances. Prior to the release of 3.3, SoftNAS needed to be deployed into a public subnet, as it used Elastic IP Addresses to facilitate this communication. However, version 3.3 enables SNAP-HA via private IP addresses, which means SoftNAS can now be deployed into private subnets. This allows for more flexible deployment options and greater control over access to the appliance. In addition, using private IPs allow for faster failover, as waiting for an EIP to switch instances is no longer necessary.

Another feature of version 3.3 is the option of creating an Amazon S3 Gateway cache, in which new Amazon S3 object writes and recent object reads can be cached locally on SoftNAS cloud. Using this Amazon S3 gateway cache model can improve latency and throughput to your Amazon S3 objects. Using a cache can also help smooth out any variances in network throughput, leading to more consistent performance.

Version 3.3 has also introduced two features with the intention of improving data durability. One such feature is the ability to create Amazon EBS snapshots from within the StorageCenter UI, so SoftNAS can be a more central utility to manage all of your backups. The other feature is Automatic Drive Sparing, allowing for a failed drive to automatically be replaced by a hot spare – this means no manual intervention is required for array rebuilds.

Amazon EBS Snapshots:

SoftNAS Cloud 3.3 also provides more granular monitoring from within the StorageCenter UI; you can now view IOPS:

Lastly, there have been some improvements to the compatibility of SoftNAS, including support for the GovCloud Amazon S3 region, and better integration with Windows “Previous Versions,” including support of snapshots, file restores, and so on.

The APN is built around around APN Partners with a customer obsession, and we’re happy to see SoftNAS updating its product based on customer feedback. If you find yourself interested, take a look at SoftNAS Cloud 3.3 in the AWS Marketplace and try it out today.